


When You Had Forever

by CapnJack



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Brotp, Episode: s01e02 The End of the World, Episode: s02e01 New Earth, Episode: s03e03 Gridlock, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-09
Updated: 2014-05-09
Packaged: 2018-01-24 03:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1589789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CapnJack/pseuds/CapnJack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you’ve got forever you don’t notice the flecks on the concrete, or bother to touch the brickwork. You don’t pause to feel the sunlight on your face, or stop to smell the roses. Unless you've met the Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When You Had Forever

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This follows the idea that Jack eventually becomes the Face of Boe, per LotTL. After rewatching Gridlock and thinking about Jack, I couldn't get this out of my head. :) The first sentence is borrowed from the Torchwood episode Dead Man Walking. Enjoy!

When you’ve got forever you don’t notice the flecks on the concrete, or bother to touch the brickwork. You don’t pause to feel the sunlight on your face, or stop to smell the roses. You stop chasing after time, effervescent and elusive to the average mortal, because you know you’ll always have more. When forever is rolling out in front of you those things that everyone else spends time marvelling at you can always leave until later, because laters are the one thing you’ll never run out of. It’s easy to stop thinking about the little pleasures, easy to stop letting yourself be blown away by the small achievements when even the larger ones feel like infinitesimal wisps of condensation across the window of your existence, fading quickly into the ether.

Unless you’ve met the Doctor. 

The Doctor teaches you all about appreciating every moment and never forgetting the wonders that make up the living; he knows all about lasting forever while not losing sight of why you’re there and where you’re from in the first place. When he talks to you he takes your concerns seriously, and when he looks at you (and he speaks from experience) and tells you to never forget what it’s like to touch the brickwork, you believe him. And you don’t. 

When the Doctor comes to call he makes forever sound exciting. When the Doctor stops to visit he reminds you of the newest development in the bread toasting industry and tells you to hurry on out and explore it. He brings new exciting gadgets and tickets to planets and constellations you never even knew existed, and unveils to you every pocket of the universe he knows. But the best part is when he drops you back and reminds you he hasn’t seen everything, and he probably never will. That’s your adventure. He makes it sound fantastic and brilliant and incredible and you _believe_ him, and you’re always left lusting for more so that next time, next time you’ll have something marvellous to show to him in return. Eventually you might know a secret he doesn’t, and you almost can’t wait. 

That is, until the Doctor stops coming. 

You wait and you wonder and you start to worry, until searching for him seems to be the only course of action; standing in the face of your forever alone simply isn’t an option. He’s always about, you’re always catching the dust and debris he leaves behind as he whirls somewhere new but there’s no way of knowing if he’s your Doctor or before you or hundreds of years after you and linear time has never felt so _slow_ , and _frustrating_ , and eventually, you begin to give up. 

You’ve lived a million lives in billions of years and have told so many stories that you’ve begun to get muddled. You can’t always discern the truth from the ones you made up but you carry on and you continue to learn and forget in equal measure though you always remember your Doctor. His significance pulses through your existence like a second heart with a beat falling slowly towards a flat line. Because one day, you stop staring at the flecks in the concrete. You forget to feel the bricks beneath your fingers. Eventually you stop breathing the air and you can barely remember where you started because you’ve been on this journey for so long now. You can’t recall faces of those who were once the most important to you, now simple blips in your existence and you wish they weren’t but can’t help that they are.

At some point, and you don’t remember when, you made peace with everything. You suspended yourself unmoving in the aging of the universe, and you stopped caring.

You hear of the impending explosion of that planet you’ve always loved, and you finally draw yourself from your shell to sponsor a spectator event—not for them, not for anyone else but for yourself. So you can watch it end and savour the singe of the supernova and hope to feel something for its light finally burning out. The likes of some invited on your station are not to your taste, but of course you don’t care. Small nags like Lady Cassandra O’Brien are like the tiniest gasp compared to you, she wouldn’t be worth the ten seconds it would take to put her in her place.

You resign yourself to watching something else you cared for fade, but then you see him. You stir. You remember. You blink awake like an animal that has slept in hibernation for a billion years and what remains of your heart and your pulse quicken like muscle memory at the sight of him. 

It’s your Doctor. 

You’ve known so many over the time you’ve spent with him, when you’ve seen one face of the Doctor you’ve seen a hundred, but you never forgot this one. Not this one. Not this one with the big ears and the floppy nose and the battered leather jacket and you _pay attention_. The wrinkles around his brow speak of smiling and happiness but his eyes are hollow and empty and echo the coldness of a war that shook the universe. It’s a look you recognise, because it’s a look you know is reflected in your own ancient orbs. The creases of his leather jacket tell you of use, and the scuffs on his shoes speak of running, but mostly you know his entire aura whispers to you about strange adventures in far off places you’d almost forgotten might be there.

And then your heart breaks because you know he won’t know you. Because you’ve moved past your Doctor now and have met newer Doctors, and though this Doctor has a human who stirs something within you she isn’t _you_ , so you know it must be before he'll be able to identify with you as you were. You can’t even remember how you used to perceive yourself before time took over. It’s like trying to grasp at the shadow of someone forgotten.

The blonde human. Who is she? You remember his penchant for travelling companions and over the years you’ve met a thousand, but none have ever stirred a reaction in you such as this. Then you remember and you breathe deeply from the shock because it’s—

_Hello. Sorry, that was hello twice there. Dull but, you know, thorough._

You miss her. 

She hasn’t even met you. 

When the Earth explodes, the Doctor works his magic and the station is saved you wish you had tears left to cry but they dried and shattered a millennia ago—because there they go, back to the wonderful box to the same old life that lasts and lasts and lasts that you know you’ll never be part of again.

That is the moment you realise you’re running out of forever.

It’s an inkling in your mind, but it’s fierce. Prophecies have been made about you and your old friend more times than there are stars in every sky and you know you have things to tell him. Great stories. Great secrets only to be imparted to the lonely God, the Oncoming Storm. The Wandering Man. Your Doctor.

So you continue to reconnect with your time, continue to stretch out your consciousness to the one man left awake in a universe that remains asleep until finally you draw him back to you. The nurses think you are dying. You know you’re just beginning to live again.

It’s a different Doctor this time, the one who still had her. He watches you with such marvel and such wonder that you know all you are is another story to him, an enigma to describe to his travelling companions much as he once did to you. He admires you as a being that has breathed with the universe and has no idea that all you are is because of him.

_I have grown tired of the universe, Doctor, but you have taught me to look at it anew._

Just as he has every time before, as he has for thousands of years. You can lose the brickwork and roses and the developments in the bread toasting industry but you will always remember your Doctor, who blinks as if the universe were newer and brighter every time he opens his eyes. You’d forgotten that. Now you remember. You know now that there is more to come and you know the Doctor will be there and it’s invigorated you in a way that no medicine ever could; you can fight death, and you can still win. And, with fondness, you also realise the impossible you’d always dreamed about has come to pass; you finally know a secret that your Doctor doesn’t know.

You blink and thirty years pass and New Earth has wiped itself out. _He has arrived._

When the planet began to fall and you requested to be wired to the mainframe while protecting the Novice who has been your constant companion for so many years, you knew New New York was to be your final resting place. Fitting, you decide, as you love this species and this old planet and you will without regret give your life so they can survive. _Save them, Doctor, save them_.

Your Doctor’s plan starts to fail and you can you feel your time coming, can feel that elusive death beginning to cushion your fall as you make a final push to let everybody else live, and the skies are blessed with people. As a result you crack and you break and you begin to fade but _it’s good to breathe the air once more_. Your eyes are unblinking like a child’s as you stare at the ceiling, noting the fleck of the stone and the pattern of brickwork. You can even smell the flowers, and it’s all thanks to the man beside you and he doesn’t even realise. 

You have so much you want to express; so much you want to thank him for, so much you want to warn him about of what is to come and, most of all, you want to give him any fraction of the reassurance and the love and the care this man has given you. However, you are aware of paradoxes and time and the need to preserve its fluid nature and understand when you see the one that is _Miss Martha Jones_ that all this time he’s _known_. Through every moment you spent with the Doctor, he knew how you were going to die. 

With every reminder of brickwork and flowers and toasters he was trying to tell you that one day you would run out of laters, and the sands of your forever would finally stop. He didn’t want you to lose yourself to the progression of time when none of it would in fact be as infinite as you were led to believe. You’re overwhelmed with gratitude for him, because although somewhere in-between you forgot the treasured little things, you remembered when it was important. He taught you that. 

You almost want to cry and laugh both at the Doctor’s final great and magnificent secret he has unknowingly revealed to you now—even when you were sure you finally knew more than he, this wonderful man has always been one step ahead of you. He’s always been protecting you from wasting your life all the way through your alleged eternity. When you had forever you feared the Doctor's mortality with the knowledge that one day it'd just be you and the end of the universe; instead he saved you, billions of years ago, and carried on alone. 

_Everything has it’s time. You know that, old friend, better than most._

He’s _always_ known. 

It’s as if the Doctor you know is right there, giving you a final wink and reminding you of how fantastic it all was. Because it was, wasn’t it? Every adventure was precious. Every second was to be cherished. All the words in the entirety of creation could not measure up to the love you feel for the Doctor, and you’re beyond thankful that you get to spend your last few moments with him. This Doctor may not know who you are, but he has everything to come and that is _brilliant_. 

With your final breath you release your final burden, and his journey begins again.  



End file.
